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New 7200 RPM drives on the horizon?

SDAVE

SDAVE

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Jun 16, 2007
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I've read through many hard drive threads here, and am 100% sure that I want a 7200RPM drive.

The 7200.4 Seagate 500GB drive is a bit old, from what I gather. Is there a new one out or will be out in the next few weeks?

My stock 5400RPM drive is nasty. It takes 2 mins to save a 1GB Photoshop file.
 
SDAVE said:
...My stock 5400RPM drive is nasty. It takes 2 mins to save a 1GB Photoshop file.
Click to expand...

...how old is the drive?

...how full is the drive?

Have you run the equivalent of a defrag program on it lately?

I replaced my stock Hitachi HDD with a WD Scorpio Blue (which is 5400 RPM also) and it was a faster HDD due to cache, seek times, etc...
 
The drive I have right now is only about 8 months old. Yes, I've run a full defrag via iDefrag from the boot DVD, so it's fairly defragmented.

It's a 320GB Hitachi drive.
 
There will be a refresh to the WD Black line shortly however, I doubt it will be in the next few weeks. New revisions of the 320gb and 640gb @ 7200RPM will be upon us early next year is my guess.
 
Thanks!

So do you think the new 640GB 7200RPM drives will be faster than the Seagates? Don't have the $$$ for SSD right now, so 7200RPM is what I can get.
 
The larger the drive, even at the same rpm speed, the faster the drive.

BTW, the 7200 Seagate is great. I'm not that interested until 750 or 1 terabyte laptop hard drives emerge.

Interesting that WD still makes a large PATA laptop drive, though slower, it is great. The 320gb 5400 drive kicks new life into old ibooks/powerbooks nicely.
 
I asked the same question a couple of weeks back.

But now I have a 7200.4 sitting on my desk in a USB case because I don't have the right sized Torx screwdriver (dammit :mad:). I went ahead to buy it anyway because even if newer, larger and faster 7200 drives come out, the price to performance over the 7200.4 wouldn't be justified for me.
 
Defrag doesn't really change that much, what does is how full your hard drive is. As data fills the hard drive the head has to move towards the centre of the disc where it spins more slowly.

7200rpm 640 GBs will be coming out sometime around spring 2010.
 
Gabriel GR said:
There is the new 7200 RPM 500GB Hitachi 7K500 which is supposedly pretty good.
Click to expand...

Agreed. I have this new hitachi and I love it. There are too many horror stories about the seagate IMO. Im like the OP in the sense that I read ridiculous amounts of threads on different manufacturers for things like HDDs and I would say AT LEAST 50% of the reviews I read on the seagates say they failed on the owner.

I have been using WD my whole life and love them. I decided to step out and try the Hitachi and am loving it so far. That along with the intel SSD is treating me well thus far.


.02
 
Defragmentation?

Get lost of old Windows behaviours and don't waste your time with defragmentation programs.
IIRC OS X defrags the drive itself while your computer is in IDLE.

Edit:
I don't think we will see improvements in 500GB SATA drives. They are as fast as they can be as they already are stripped down to a single platter.
Faster drives are only the ones with higher capacity, but they aren't released with 7200RPM, yet.
If you really want to see considerable improvements in your drive speed, get a decent SSD.
 
The WD 640GB Blue 5400rpm is just as fast as the Seagate 500GB 7200rpm in some tests, AND you get a bigger capacity.

Check out the review:

The new 640GB Scorpio Blue is almost as low on power as the Fujitsu MJA2500CH and delivers roughly the same transfer rates. However, WD reaches shorter access times and great I/O performance. Keep in mind that this is a 5,400 RPM drive, yet it matches Seagate’s 7,200 RPM Momentus 7200.4 in the database and file server tests where it technically shouldn’t...

Capacity-wise, there is no alternative to Western Digital’s 640GB Scorpio Blue. The drive has no real disadvantage and delivers reasonably low power consumption. Its throughput is top notch, and access times are quick. Application performance could clearly be improved, but this is probably why there are 7,200 RPM alternatives like the Momentus 7200.4, which still leads in 2.5” mobile hard drive performance. If you want the fastest possible drive for your notebook, you should go for the Seagate drive or an SSD. The best compromise between capacity and performance is currently WD’s 640GB Scorpio.
Click to expand...

Source: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/640gb-mobile-hdd,2451-3.html
 
WOOHOO! i just updated my 500 gb WD Scorpio Blue 5400 rpm to the Hitachi travelstar 500gb 7200 rpm hard drive! To anyone thinking about upgrading to this hard drive you should do it! its extremely fast, quiet, and doesn't run too hot. The 30% increase in speed is a big difference and I can tell when starting up the comp, opening programs, even scrolling in websites! I use to be able to feel a little lag when scrolling in flash websites but now its better. I used SuperDuper to fully clone my hard drive so I didn't have to install any programs. :) :)
 
Transporteur said:
Defragmentation?

Get lost of old Windows behaviours and don't waste your time with defragmentation programs.
IIRC OS X defrags the drive itself while your computer is in IDLE.

Edit:
I don't think we will see improvements in 500GB SATA drives. They are as fast as they can be as they already are stripped down to a single platter.
Faster drives are only the ones with higher capacity, but they aren't released with 7200RPM, yet.
If you really want to see considerable improvements in your drive speed, get a decent SSD.
Click to expand...

I don't know of any 500gb/platter 2.5" drive. There have been 500gb platters on 3.5" drives for a year but the maximum for 2.5" is 320, in the WD 640gb disk.
 
SDAVE said:
I've read through many hard drive threads here, and am 100% sure that I want a 7200RPM drive.

The 7200.4 Seagate 500GB drive is a bit old, from what I gather. Is there a new one out or will be out in the next few weeks?

My stock 5400RPM drive is nasty. It takes 2 mins to save a 1GB Photoshop file.
Click to expand...

What type of mac do you have. You might want to consider a RAID 0 setup for maximum performance.

If you have a mbp, you can still do a RAID 0 but you'll have to remove the DVD drive and install a second HD there, and by a USB external DVD. Just do some research and youll see what i mean.

http://lifehacker.com/256546/install-a-raid-on-your-macbook-pro
 
borcanm said:
What type of mac do you have. You might want to consider a RAID 0 setup for maximum performance.

If you have a mbp, you can still do a RAID 0 but you'll have to remove the DVD drive and install a second HD there, and by a USB external DVD. Just do some research and youll see what i mean.

http://lifehacker.com/256546/install-a-raid-on-your-macbook-pro
Click to expand...

I have a late 2008 Unibody MBP 15". I thought about RAID0, but I need the drive sometimes.

I heard about the Hitachi, but after the horror stories (albeit old) I only stick to Seagate and WD.
 
n0d3 said:
The WD 640GB Blue 5400rpm is just as fast as the Seagate 500GB 7200rpm in some tests, AND you get a bigger capacity.
Click to expand...
7200rpm drives will always have better access times compared to 5400rpm drives and that is what counts most in day-to-day tasks. Access time is the reason why even the crappiest SSDs beat hard-drives in real-world application benchmarks.

I've tried 5400rpm drives several times. For example when the Hitachi 5k160 came out, it was hailed as the fastest 5400rpm drive ever. At that time my previous machine had the original 7k60 in it (the first ever 7200rpm notebook drive, released in 2004) and compared to that, the 5400rpm drive, despite being several generations newer, felt simply slow.
 
California said:
The larger the drive, even at the same rpm speed, the faster the drive.

BTW, the 7200 Seagate is great. I'm not that interested until 750 or 1 terabyte laptop hard drives emerge.

Interesting that WD still makes a large PATA laptop drive, though slower, it is great. The 320gb 5400 drive kicks new life into old ibooks/powerbooks nicely.
Click to expand...

Me neither. I am waiting for the first 750GB HDD that will fit in my mac to come out before I update. (2.5" 9mm form factor).

I don't follow Hard Drive technology much. Any indications or announcements as to when this is likely? I seem to have be waiting for ages for the manufacturers to go beyond 640GB...
 
sth said:
7200rpm drives will always have better access times compared to 5400rpm drives and that is what counts most in day-to-day tasks. Access time is the reason why even the crappiest SSDs beat hard-drives in real-world application benchmarks.

I've tried 5400rpm drives several times. For example when the Hitachi 5k160 came out, it was hailed as the fastest 5400rpm drive ever. At that time my previous machine had the original 7k60 in it (the first ever 7200rpm notebook drive, released in 2004) and compared to that, the 5400rpm drive, despite being several generations newer, felt simply slow.
Click to expand...

Always faster? I don't know about you but the review says otherwise, that is the WD 500GB Blue was just as fast (or faster than) as the Seagate 7200.4.

The 5K160 is at least 2 years old now, the newer 5400rpm drives definitely pack a bigger punch.

Benchies: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/640gb-mobile-hdd,2451-6.html
 
n0d3 said:
Always faster? I don't know about you but the review says otherwise, that is the WD 500GB Blue was just as fast (or faster than) as the Seagate 7200.4.

The 5K160 is at least 2 years old now, the newer 5400rpm drives definitely pack a bigger punch.
Click to expand...
Yeah, but so do 7200rpm drives as well.

I know that the 5400rpm drives can be quite fast in some tests, maybe even faster than some 7200rpm ones but overall (application start times etc., which make a real difference to how a system "feels"), the 7200rpm drives will always win because of the faster access times.
 
sth said:
Yeah, but so do 7200rpm drives as well.

I know that the 5400rpm drives can be quite fast in some tests, maybe even faster than some 7200rpm ones but overall (application start times etc., which make a real difference to how a system "feels"), the 7200rpm drives will always win because of the faster access times.
Click to expand...

:confused: Did you even see the link? The 7200rpm Seagate drive has a SLOWER access time than a 5400rpm WD drive. I was comparing a 5400rpm to a 7200rpm all this while, not between 5400rpm drives.

h2benchw_access_read.png


h2benchw_access_write.png


So I would say your use of the term "always" where the 7200rpm would be faster than a 5400rpm, does not hold true.
 
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